When Brian and I arrived at Nationals Park and took our seats, I saw columnist Charles Krauthammer in a nearby section. I like Charles, as a friend, and as an intellect. He’s certainly overcome a fair amount of adversity—he was paralyzed after a diving accident during his first year at Harvard Medical School—and he provides those of us in the trenches with inspiration through his writings.
“What do you think?” I asked, assuming he knew I was speaking about Franken’s election, and what that meant for Republicans.
“I think we should pass a Senate resolution saying the Nationals can’t trade Nick Johnson.”
I would far rather have taken up that issue than what I knew was coming down the road: Obamacare. Everybody knew there were problems with the current health-care system. Costs were out of control and too many people were being squeezed out of the market. But there were intelligent paths to reform. We could end junk lawsuits against doctors and hospitals, which drive up costs. We could encourage healthy choices such as prevention and wellness programs, which hold costs down. We could further lower costs by letting consumers buy coverage across state lines and allow small businesses to band together for lower insurance rates. But the fact of the matter was that when it came to the real problems with the system, Obama’s health-care bill didn’t solve any of them. Rather, it used them as an excuse to undermine the very things that people around the world admire most about the American health-care system—the wide array of choices, the constant innovations in technology and treatments, and the high quality of care.
The proposed Affordable Care Act, which quickly became known as Obamacare, was awful. This so-called cure—to overhaul the entire system—was worse than the disease. The cost would be staggering, and it was extremely unwise to ask the government to take this on when it was straining under the health care it was already responsible for, Medicare and Medicaid. And few Americans believed that allowing the folks in charge of the IRS to take over all of American health care, as the Affordable Care Act set out to do, was a step in the right direction.
My goal was clear from the beginning: Because this was the worst bill to come across my desk in the nearly three decades I’d served in the Senate, and because this was not anything like a bill we would have enacted, I didn’t want a single Republican to vote for it. It had to be very obvious to the voters which party was responsible for this terrible policy, and I wanted a clear line of demarcation—they were for this, and we were against it. The best we could do was to ensure there was no confusion in the public’s mind come the next election that this was in any way a bipartisan proposal, because it didn’t deserve bipartisan support. I counseled my colleagues: “Don’t muddy this up.” Just one Republican choosing to support it—wanting to appear to be on the yes side of a law that was all but inevitable—threatened to bring others along, and allowed the other side to then label the measure bipartisan. So the strategy, simply stated, was to keep everybody together in opposition.
If only its execution were as simple. Over the next several months, this task consumed nearly all of my time. Early on, the administration reached out to members of our conference who were deeply involved in health-care issues, like Chuck Grassley, who was ranking on the Finance Committee; Mike Enzi, who was ranking on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee (two committees that have major health-care jurisdiction) and, of course, Olympia Snowe, who had often voted with Democrats in the past. In addition to having one-on-one meetings with them to encourage them to stay with the party on this, I was also meeting every Wednesday afternoon with my entire conference, trying to build the view that we were all in this together. I brought in experts to help us make sense of what was a very complicated bill (one that would end up being 2,074 pages long). One of the things I’ve discovered about being leader is that people do, at least most of the time, pay attention to what I say, so every morning in my remarks on the Senate floor, I was out there pounding away on the bill. Good politics is repetition, and just when I started to bore myself to tears, I knew I’d begun to drive the message home.
Conduct in the Senate Chamber has always been guided by rules of decorum. Regardless of the intensity of disagreement on any matter, senators are expected to speak to one another with respect. It has always been this way, since the Senate’s inception, and very rarely throughout history has anyone acted with insolence. (One notable exception, of course, was the day in 1856 when Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina nearly caned to death Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts after Sumner had insulted Brooks’s state during a debate about slavery. But that’s another story.) The majority party presides over the Senate, and the role of the presiding officer is often assigned to relatively new members. It’s not a great job to sit in that chair for an hour, but it helps the newer members get a better handle on how the place operates. During one of my speeches on Obamacare, Senator Al Franken was presiding. As I addressed him, which one does when speaking on the floor, Franken, clearly not approving of what I was saying, in a room that once hosted the likes of Robert Taft and Mike Mansfield, began making silly faces and rolling his eyes to mock me. It was distracting and disrespectful. When I finished, I walked up to the chair and whispered in his ear.
“Al,” I said. “Let me remind you that there are rules that guide the way we interact here. You may disagree with what others are saying, but this is not the set of Saturday Night Live.”
To his credit, Franken later delivered me a letter of apology, and with it, I hoped he had learned a valuable lesson.
If I had to pick the key moment of the health-care debate, it was when Olympia Snowe of Maine, the most liberal member of our conference who’d expressed some reservations about voting against the bill, and who was the last member whose vote I thought we might lose, came to tell me she had decided to oppose it. By this time, the administration knew that she was their last shot, and it had been a full-court press by both sides to get her to vote our way. Among the arguments helpful in making our case was that, according to poll data, Obamacare was not even popular in her liberal state. We now had every single one of our members on board. I felt an enormous sense of accomplishment and relief.
As we prepared to take up the vote, President Obama said, “I think it’s important for every single member of the Senate to take a careful look at what’s in the bill.” This was a ridiculous and misleading statement, because there was no bill to read. The version we would consider was not the one that we would vote on—because the final bill was still being worked on in private, behind closed doors. Even Senator Dick Durbin, the assistant majority leader on the Democratic side, admitted he hadn’t seen the details of this bill. The only thing we knew for sure about it was that it would raise taxes, raise premiums, and slash Medicare by $700 billion to pay for a vast expansion of government into health care that an overwhelming majority of Americans opposed. The only argument Democrats were left with was a call to history. Well, history was going to be made either way. And this much was clear: passing this bill in the way Obama, Reid, and the others were trying to pass it—ramming it down the throats of not just Republicans, but all Americans—would be a historic mistake that those who supported it would come to regret.
The first opportunity to defeat the bill was on Saturday night, November 21, 2009, when we voted on cloture on the motion to proceed to it, which is the first step toward beginning debate. If I could convince even one Democrat to vote no, Senator Reid wouldn’t have the sixty votes he needed to even begin the debate. That November evening, I did everything I could to convince just one of my Democratic colleagues—just one—to keep the country from making a huge mistake. I made sure they knew the bottom line: we were voting on a bill that was little more than a massive monument to bureaucracy and spending. At a moment when more than one in ten working Americans was looking for a job, and the Chinese were lecturing us about our debt, the bill cost us trillions, money we didn’t have and could not afford.
That was the incredibly sad irony of this whole debate. The problem that got us where we were was that health-care costs were out of control. Yet the neutral, nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the scorekeeper on matters such as these, said that under the bill, health-care costs were actually going to go up, not down. So 2,074 pages and trillions of dollars later, this bill didn’t even meet the most basic criterion for fixing the system—to lower costs. The Affordable Care Act was a big old oxymoron. It would actually make care less affordable. And yet every single Democrat voted yes on that first vote. And every Republican present? We all voted no.
If I had been the guy in charge of all this, I might have paused at this moment to consider what this meant. I might even have taken a look at the vote tallies of some of the most far-reaching legislation of the past century. Medicare and Medicaid were both approved with the support of about half the members of the minority. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 passed with the votes of thirty out of thirty-two members of the Republican minority—all but two. Only six senators voted against the Social Security Act. And only eight voted against the Americans with Disabilities Act. In no case had those votes happened by throwing these bills together in a back room and dropping them on the floor with a stopwatch running. It happened through a laborious process of legislating, persuasion, and coalition-building. It took time and patience and hard work, and it guaranteed that every one of these laws had stability. So maybe we needed to rethink what the future was going to hold for a bill of this magnitude to be enacted with literally no support whatsoever from the minority party. The mess to come was inevitable. Anyone with a sense of the long term could see that. But Democrats plowed forward anyway.
Knowing how precarious support from his own party was, Reid made the decision to keep us in session until the bill passed. He didn’t want to let his members return home to their states, where they’d inevitably hear from their constituents about how much they hated this bill. Losing even one Democrat’s vote would mean that the bill was dead. Reid’s timing was particularly inconvenient. Majority leaders are always threatening that if something doesn’t happen, we’ll have to stay over a weekend, or postpone a recess. It reminds me of the way a parent threatens a child—if you don’t behave, we’re turning around and going home this minute. Nine out of ten times they don’t actually go home because Mom wants to stay out just as much as her child. The same often goes in the Senate. But not this time.
We went into session on the bill on November 30 and stayed in seven days a week until Christmas Eve. It was a lot to ask of our staffs, but I knew everyone on my team would do whatever we could to stop this thing. One morning, I called everyone together to let them know that I was going to do the same. “Look,” I said, “I like Thanksgiving and Christmas as much as anybody. But we have to try to stop this, and I’m prepared to be here until hell freezes over to kill this thing. I am completely determined, if possible, to kill this bill, no matter the extraordinary lengths they’ll go to.”
The reason Reid and his colleagues went to such extraordinary lengths, and employed these strong-arm tactics, was that the damn thing was so unpopular that if they let anyone out, they wouldn’t get their votes. Even with sixty Democrats, it was hard for them to corral the votes, and Reid was forced to keep us there, cooped up in the Capitol, driving it forward, and making unseemly deals along the way. When Reid announced he would unveil the final bill on Saturday, December 19, and then force a vote in the middle of the night about thirty-six hours later, the whole thing started to feel absurd. One of the most major and far-reaching pieces of legislation in decades and this is how they wanted to approach it?
To make the situation even worse, during these already interminable days, DC was hit by the infamous “Snowmageddon,” a record storm that brought nearly sixteen inches of snow the weekend before Christmas Eve. On Monday, with federal agencies and schools closed on account of the storm, we showed up for a vote at 1:08 a.m. People couldn’t get home afterward and a few staff members who lived within walking distance of Capitol Hill invited other staff members to stay with them. In the morning, they all trudged together through a few feet of fresh snow to get back in time for another vote at 7:00 a.m.
Knowing they weren’t going to get one of our forty votes, the Democrats were in trouble. To get to sixty, the number required to break a filibuster, they began to engage in a rather aggressive effort to get everyone on board, catering to absurd demands from the more moderate members of their party. We knew from our experience with the stimulus that when the Obama administration and their allies on Capitol Hill were worried about getting the votes, they frequently turned to the practice of inserting into bills seemingly innocuous language that actually granted huge giveaways to the lawmakers they needed to vote for the bill. The legalese often made it very difficult to pick up, and to make matters worse, they never allowed time for anyone to actually read the bill. Going into the final week before the bill was to be presented in all its morbid glory, we set up an elaborate system of lawyers, wonks, and communicators to identify legislative anomalies that could be special deals for Democrats who were on the fence. The trick was to get these anomalies out to the public as quickly as possible because the entire bill would, within hours of its unveiling, be branded as a success by an increasingly compliant media.
My health-care team, led by Meg Hauck and Scott Raab, tasked the Senate Finance Committee with identifying the potential kickbacks. Meg and Scott would then vet them and send the most egregious examples to Josh Holmes in my communications shop. Josh would quickly brand the item and pass it along to our press secretary, John Ashbrook, to pitch to the press. This system identified a special deal for Louisiana that Josh labeled the Louisiana Purchase, and a special deal for Florida senator Bill Nelson that he called the Gator Aid. Their biggest victory came at the expense of moderate Nebraska Democrat Ben Nelson, who traded his vote for federal Medicaid dollars, a deal Josh dubbed the Cornhusker Kickback. This one was particularly infuriating, and no one was going to let it lie.
“What’s the plan?” Brian asked Josh after we got news of Nelson’s vote.
“We’re gonna make this bill as popular as an internment camp,” Josh said.
Within hours, the Cornhusker Kickback took on a life of its own and became emblematic of an entire process that made the American people absolutely disgusted. Undeterred, Democrats continued to hold the line in support of an indefensible bill that was drifting toward political toxicity.
But, as hard as it may be to believe, despite the anger we all felt about these tactics, and that the Democrats did not care one iota that this bill hadn’t even a shred of bipartisan support—not to mention the inconvenience to our families and dealing with holiday plans in chaos—in some ways we were enjoying ourselves. There was a wonderful feeling of camaraderie. My office manager, Julie Adams, made sure the office was well stocked with food. Every few days she’d run to Costco and return with enough fruit, soft drinks, coffee, and snacks to feed everyone stuck there along with us. Stef would order take-out Chinese or pizza in the evenings. Members and their staffs would come in and we’d all sit around the table in my large conference room, getting to know one another better.
Toward the end, all forty of us Republican senators gathered in the LBJ Room for a caucus lunch. I tried to keep these as uplifting as possible, allowing us a space to come together and take a breath. At one point John McCain stood up, commanding the attention of everyone in the room.
“Colleagues, I don’t know why this comes to mind right now but I want to tell you a story about a Christmas I spent at the Hanoi Hilton.” John is someone whom everyone in that room had a great deal of respect for. As our presidential candidate, he was the best-known member of our caucus. If this were the Constitutional Convention, he’d be our George Washington. And while, of course, we were all well aware of his service to our country, and the nearly six years he spent in captivity in North Vietnam, his experien
ce as a POW was not a topic most of us had ever broached with him. I think we all felt the lumps forming in our throats just at the idea of what John was going to tell us.
As the son of an admiral, John had been offered early release as a way for the guards to break the spirit of those who had been there longer and whose turn was due to come before his. John refused, and over the next several years he suffered unfathomable torture at the hands of the guards. There was one guard who seemed to particularly enjoy torturing him. One morning, this guard came to get John. He led him out to the dusty courtyard, where he loosened the ropes binding his arms. “I had no idea what was happening,” John said. “And I thought this was it. He was taking me outside to kill me.”
He directed John to a patch in the dirt and pushed him to his knees. Then the guard took his foot, and in the dirt in front of him, he drew a cross. It was the morning of December 25. Christmas.
“I think this story is on my mind today because we’re all here together,” John said. “I know we’re going to lose this, but I believe that in staying together for a principle, we are also making it our finest hour. And it’s made me think of the camaraderie and friendship I felt with the guys I had around me those years. I thank every one of you for keeping up this fight.”
When he had finished speaking, I don’t think there was one person around us who wasn’t staring at their plate because nobody wanted to look up and see a room full of teary-eyed senators.
Later that day, John’s words stayed with me. And his positive outlook infected my own. We were experiencing a moment where we could’ve picked up our toys and gone home to pout about what had befallen us. As Democrats gathered for their final press conference in the Capitol’s Ohio Clock Corridor to announce they had the votes to pass Obamacare in the Senate, I knew that the members of my conference, my staff, and I were going to make sure the public understood, come the next election, who was responsible for this mess. And I couldn’t have agreed more with something Josh Holmes said later that day.
The Long Game Page 20